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Abstract :
[en] The Phoenician Utica remains today largely unknown, as well as the role that the ancient city held in the Phoenician expansion in the western Mediterranean. Aristotle and Pliny the Elder mentioned Utica as a maritime and port city and evaluate its origin around the 11th c. BC.. However, in the present state of research, no archaeological evidence goes back beyond the 7th c. BC.. Today, the ancient port city is located in the heart of the Medjerda delta, 10 km inland. Although the Utica site has been the subject of archaeological excavations since the 19th c., the location of port infrastructures, dating from Phoenician and Roman periods, remains unknown.
Based on this observation, our research focuses on two main issues:
Where are the port infrastructures of Utica?
Why the city, formerly a seaport city, is today located 10 km from the coast?
The location and the study of port infrastructures will bring primordial elements of response to the question of the city founding. The study of river paleoenvironments of the Medjerda delta during the Holocene aim to a better understanding of the nature of the settlement, as well as the function of the city of Utica. This study will also assess the impact of the ancient city on the environment and understand how the city has adapted to the mobility of this Mediterranean delta. Furthermore, the study of sedimentary processes causing the filling of the harbour basin will lead to speculate about the causes of the abandonment of the structures and more generally the decline of the city in favor of the city of Carthage. It will also detect if natural or anthropogenic factors have influenced this deltaic progradation over the centuries.
This project proposes an interdisciplinary reflection to understand the Medejerda delta landscape changes during the Holocene. It starts from an archaeological problem and proposes the contribution of geoarchaeology to the understanding of the relationship between ancient societies and their environment. A major originality of this project lies in the multidisciplinary approach, which aim to provide an evolutive image of the landscapes of the Medjerda watershed, and to precise the sedimentary record considering control variables such as climate and anthropogenic pressure.
The study of fluvial palaeoenvironments and sedimentary processes will be carried out through the mechanical extraction of cores (~10 m deep) to reach the early Holocene. Selected sediment samples will then be studied in laboratory, using different and complementary approaches. Particle size analysis and quartz morphoscopy will help to clarify the processes involved in the successive phases of deposits associated with different sedimentary environments. It will be supplemented by a series of sedimentological (magnetic susceptibility, mineralogy, organic and inorganic geochemistry) and biological analyses (pollen, ostracods) to reconstruct the evolution of the landscape over the last millennia. This reconstruction will be related to climate changes during the Holocene. The combination of mineralogical and geochemical approaches will help to identify the origin of clay minerals to determine their source regions and to highlight contamination by human activities. The influence of anthropogenic factors will be confirmed by analysing lead isotopes. Meanwhile, a series of radiocarbon dating will be conducted to establish the chrono-stratigraphic framework of the different evolution phases of the delta.
More generally, this project focuses on the importance of knowledge of the past to understand and grasp the consequences of the human impact on the environment, more specifically on the deltaic environments.
